The purpose of the invention is to enable the sharing of a specialty FTT10A transceiver among several to many Echelon Neuron nodes where the FTT10A transceiver was originally designed for and marketed as suitable for, one and only one node. It is desirable to share the FTT10A transceiver among as many nodes as possible due to the cost of the FTT10A transceiver. An FTT10A transceiver alone costs approximately $20US whereas an EIA485 transceiver costs approximately $1US.
The Neuron was specifically designed with an interface to an EIA485 transceiver (LonWorks Technology Device Data User's Guide, pages 4-9 to 4-15, incorporated by reference herein) in a single-ended mode or to a FTT10A (FTT10A Free Topology Transceiver User's Guide) also in a single-ended mode (there are also other transceivers types which are not relevant to this application). Normally, the Neurons are networked based on a local topology of all EIA485 based nodes or all FTT10A (and LPT10A self-powered) nodes (among others), with all interfacing between different network topologies requiring an intelligent router device costing $300US and up.
The invention substitutes an EIA485 transceiver to EIA485 transceiver based balanced line differential pair network intervening between the normal single-ended mode interface on the Neuron and the single-ended mode interface on the FTT10A transceiver. Direction control is independent of the information content and is solely based on line activity. The invention enables the construction of larger topologies than what could be realized without intelligent routers being required every 32 nodes approximately. In other words, where an FTT10A topology alone could contain up to 32 nodes or an EIA485 topology alone could contain up to 128 nodes without requiring an intelligent router, the combined topology could be comprised of up to 32.times.128 or 4096 total nodes before requiring an intelligent router.